How to Delete WordPress Site Permanently

There might be various reasons for you to delete your WordPress sites from the Internet. For instance, you may want to completely remove a site that is for the testing purpose only. Or, you just no longer want to blog online anymore. No matter what reason is, if you do not know how to do, you can check the below tutorial. From it, you can learn how to delete WordPress site permanently.

In most cases, you may only remove all the files and database of your WordPress site from the web servers. It is true that you can delete a site by doing so. However, your site still might be found from the search engines and some cached snapshots. If you want to remove all the traces of the site from the Internet, you can check the below steps.

Backup Your Website

If you have taken some efforts to start and run your WordPress site, it is possible that you may change your mind in the future after deleting the site from the web. In this case, even if your main aim is website removal, we still recommend you to make a WordPress backup and to save the backup files on your local computer and some cloud storage services.

Remove All the Website Contents

When removing your WordPress site, you firstly need to delete all the posts, pages, files and any other contents on it. To do this, you can start with the WP Mass Delete plugin. With it, you can bulk delete all your website posts and pages based on the conditions of post content, date range and publishing status.

Here, you simply need to click the Settings > WP Mass Delete button. And then, you can start the removal by deciding the following conditions.

Date interval – As you are going to delete the whole site, you can leave the date range fields blank for choosing all the contents.

Types of items – Here, you can choose both posts and pages.

Post status – Also, you need to choose all the status options of Published, Schedules, Pending, Draft and Private.

Now, you can click the Delete the Posts button to remove all the website contents in a comprehensive manner.

Delete All Website Files

In addition to the posts and pages, your site still contains a lot of files for plugins, themes, media and many more. In this case, you need to remove all of them that are stored on your web server. For this, you can use the FTP client surely.

However, if your web host offers the cPanel control panel and you are not familiar with the FTP, we highly recommend you to try the File Manager tool. With the web based interface of this tool, you can remove the files with ease.

After entering the control panel, you need to hit the File Manager button from the Files section. And then, you have to locate at the root directory for deleting all the available folders and files.

Drop Your Website Database

Now, you need to enter your account of phpMyAdmin to drop your current database. After entering this tool, you can find all your created database options. Here, you simply need to target the one that is generated for your removal WordPress site, and then, click the Drop button.

Configure Your Robots.txt File

In fact, the above-mentioned steps already help you delete the whole WordPress site thoroughly. However, you still need to prevent the search engines from crawling and indexing your website. For this, you need to use your robots.txt file that can help you easily tell the search engines that you do not want to have your pages crawled anymore.

Now, you should enter this special file and edit it for adding the following lines.

Remove the Entire WordPress Site from the Search Engines

It is true that your WordPress site no longer exists and the search engines will not crawl it at all. However, when people search for some keywords, they may still find that your pages continue showing up on the search engine result lists. Generally, all the search engines will keep the deleted websites for a while, with the wishes that you will get the site come back again.

In this case, you have to tell the search engines the fact that your site is deleted permanently and the content is no longer readable.

For doing so, the easiest way is to edit your .htaccess file that is located at the root directory of your site. Now, you simply need to add the below lines of code into it to achieve this goal.

Here, you need to replace the “www\.example\.com” with your own domain name.

Remove Your Site from the Archive Platform

In addition to the search engines, your deleted site may still be found from the Wayback Machine, which is the largest website archive. It already stores the cached versions of massive webpages.

Here, we highly recommend you to contact the staff of this platform to ask them to remove your content snapshots.

I've been an experienced web developer, SEOer and technical writer since 2003. I worked in many international high-tech companies including Microsoft and Autodesk before 2012. Now I own a startup company in San Francisco, CA, focusing on developing websites and blogs to deliver exceptional results to global readers by leveraging the power of Internet.
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